What Write Ahead Logging Is and Why It Matters

Kendra Little talks about write ahead logging in SQL Server, one of the basic concepts that developers and DBAs should understand.

Query Performance Diagnostics with sp_PerfSQ

This article discusses sp_PerfSQ a diagnostic tool designed to quantify performance features of database queries with active requests. It includes a behavioural parser and can assist in troubleshooting complex performance issues.

How Bad are Bad Page Splits?

A look at bad page splits and how they affect your database.

Parameter pain

A forum question came up a few days ago regarding an abnormally large procedural cache. In an attempt to help out, I threw together a few ideas (some wrong, some right) and started looking at the types of query that were in the cache. A lot of the queries were in the format select * […]

Transaction Isolation Levels

Introduction While working with SQL databases, we ...

Getting Wait Stats

Bad Guesses and Bad Choices: Better Living Through Indexes

Batch Cussidy In the last post, we looked at how S...

Using Filtered Indexes

Monica Rathbun fills us in on filtered indexes: Wh...

Bad Guesses and Bad Choices

Let’s Run A Cruddy Query We’ve got no supporti...

Predicate Execution Order on Mixed Data Type Columns

Watch this week’s episode on YouTube. SQL Server...